After spending the morning at the Etruscan Museum, we exited the
Borghese Gardens on to Via Flaminia and walked quite a way down this busy
boulevard, passing post-war apartment houses, boutique shops and
supermarkets, even a branch of Rome’s University, to where it stopped at
the third century Aurelian Wall and its arched gateway, the Porta del
Popolo. In the days before railroad travel, horse-drawn carriages
brought visitors from England along this very route. Now as we passed
through the arch and entered the Piazza del Popolo with the great Egyptian
obelisk at its center and the twin domed churches opening up to Via del
Corso at its far end, we experienced the same heart-stopping sensation
they undoubtedly felt coming into old Rome nearly two centuries ago.

Many of those earlier travelers had stayed at the Hotel de Russie et
des Iles Britanniques on the Via Babuino just off the Piazza del Popolo.
Built in the early 19th century, it drew a rich and royal crowd for well
over a hundred years before closing around the time of the Second World
War. For the next sixty years, the building served as the offices for
Italian Radio and Television. Today, re-imagined and restored by the Rocco
Forte group, it is once again the splendid Hotel de Russie.

We had booked a table for lunch on the advice of an American expatriate
we met: “Don’t miss the Russie,” she told us. “It’s the place
with a buzz.” Expecting a Gilded Age setting, we were stunned to find a
nearly minimalist interior with unpolished marble floors and strong-lined
modern furniture combined with antique fixtures that melded together in a
palette of grays and maroons, beiges and browns.

But there was no doubt about the “buzz.” A current of electricity
followed us down the hallway where one of us brushed shoulders with the
former (and very handsome) mayor of Rome, on to the patio where a well
known Roman wine connoisseur was being interviewed by the press, through
the Stravinsky bar where “big deals” were being consummated between
trips to a salad bar featuring lasagna and sun dried tomatoes, and up into
the restaurant where a soap opera segment was being taped, the glamorous
up-and-coming starlet just a few tables away from us.

But that was a distance away for Le Jardin du Russie is a high,
wide, and airy dining room embraced by French doors that open on to
a broad terrace. The feeling is one of comfort and ease, serene
elegance. Table linens and chairs are in soft shades of salmon,
garnet, and rose. Interior light comes from delicate Murano
chandeliers whose suspended strands of crystal look like so many
diamond necklaces.

Our lunch began with terrific Bloody Mary’s prepared according
to maitre d’ Leonardo Temperini’s directives. He had
worked as bar man at the St. Regis’ King Cole Bar in New York, he
told us, where he discovered the famed recipe that depends on
horseradish and lime instead of lemon.

Le Jardin’s executive chef, Nazzareno Graziano Menghini, is
devoted to classic Italian cooking with an emphasis on Mediterranean
flavors based on olive oil, tomatoes, and garlic. Although his menu
offers a variety of meat dishes from beef tournedos to rack of lamb,
it focuses more heavily on fish preparations. That presented no
problem to us; the difficulty lay in selecting from among
tantalizing options.

With a little bit of help, we settled on starters of shrimp with
zucchini blossoms tempura -- which betrayed an interesting oriental
influence -- and curled octopus with stewed olives and crunchy
polenta in a bouillabaisse sauce featuring crushed tomato and basil
– a harmonious blending of Mediterranean ingredients. The grouper
casserole with olives, capers and cherry tomatoes beckoned, but
Nazzareno, who buys his fish fresh from the market, did not like
that day’s catch and offered instead to prepare sea bass the same
way. That proved to be an excellent suggestion, as did the delicate
turbot fillet served with zucchini, broccoli and asparagus.

Nazzareno’s approach to cooking stresses a dependence on fresh,
quality ingredients along with a confidence in the natural flavors of
foods. Nothing was fussy or forced. There were no complicated
combinations. “When you buy good products, you don’t need to build a
lot. Just use good techniques,” he said.

Born in the countryside of Cambria, Nazzareno spent his formative
professional years in France, Germany, Austria, and England. “But now
I’m in my home country, in Italy where I can rely on products I know so
well,” he said. “I prefer the kitchen of southern Italy. It is
lighter. It is an area where there is a great variety of fruits and
vegetables. In season, you find so much in the market that I don’t feel
like using anything from another part of the world.”

In terms of preparation, Nazzareno makes use of modern techniques
without forgetting the traditional ways. His pasta maker is a good example
of the latter. “We have an old lady who comes every day for four hours
to make the fresh pasta for us,” he said. “It is wonderful to watch
her. She is so, so fast and so familiar with doing it because she has made
it at home for so many years. Every strand comes out the same. This kind
of work is very special to have in a restaurant.”

Well, Le Jardin is a very special restaurant, we thought, as we savored
a dessert of marinated strawberries with warm chocolate sauce and a glass
of Banyuls, a French dessert wine made of Grenache-noir grapes. All that
was lacking was the experience of alfresco dining. In the summer, the
scene moves out of doors on to the terrace which comes right up against
the Pincio Hill, a lushly romantic garden of balustrades and ruins, where
cypresses, umbrella pines, rose bushes, magnolia and orange trees are
interspersed among gravel paths, and stone staircases climb to the top of
the hill that ends at the Borghese Gardens. We tried to imagine sitting
out there on a midsummer’s night when the garden is lit by candles and
filled with the fragrance of roses, and il ponentino (the southwest wind)
gently stirs the warm air. Never before did we understand so fully
the longing expressed in the familiar song: “Arrivederci Roma.”

About the Authors: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer are a wife and husband
team who successfully bridge the worlds of popular culture and traditional
scholarship. Co-authors of the critically acclaimed interactive oral histories
It Happened in the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, Growing Up Jewish in
America, It Happened on Broadway, It Happened in Manhattan, It Happened in
Miami. They teach what they practice as professors at Dartmouth College.

They are also travel writers who specialize in luxury properties and fine dining
as well as cultural history and Jewish history and heritage in the United
States, Europe, and the Caribbean. More
about these authors.